BINARY BEAT.

Snail Mail Often Makes More Sense In Our Fax-happy Era

You say you're bone weary of playing voice mail tag with people who never call back to hear your pitch?

Marvin Runyon can fix that.

You say that your fax machine is so busy grinding out unsolicited junk from advertisers that you and your office mates lose crucial documents and miss deadlines?

Marvin Runyon can solve that nasty problem, too--overnight, while you slumber.

You say your e-mail can't handle all the fancy MIME (multipurpose internet mail extensions) attachments people send you, and so you miss getting needed charts and photos and sound recordings and video clips that you require to do your job?

Yup, Marvin Runyon has your answer.

So, who is Marvin Runyon?

He's postmaster general of the United States.

You can check him out at www.usps.gov, a Web site as slick as that of any high-tech giant. The site does everything from promoting special issue stamps to letting you check the progress of your overnight Express Mail packages just like they do at Federal Express.

It's about time that this technology-tossed, deadline-driven, nerve-jangled, road-raging, fax-flustered, modem-mad country remembered that Runyon is out there.

For 32 cents and a tiny bit of patience on your part, Runyon's blue-suited minions can blast past the busiest fax machine or the most cranky voice mail system.

They'll deliver your words to the target crisper and cleaner than any stack of curled pages that any fax machine ever spat out.

The fact that faxes are all but universally colorblind only sank into this informationally overloaded writer's brain the other day when Compressent Corp. sent a review copy of ChromaFax, a software package that lets people with PCs running Microsoft Windows 95 send full-color documents produced on their computers to other Windows 95 computers equipped with fax modems and running special receiving software.

The machines on the other end then print out the full-color faxes on their own color ink jet printers.

The press release that came in the box bellowed, "You produce fabulous color documents on your computer--proposals, graphics, presentations, brochures, artwork, and more. Why fax them in black and white?"

This $70 product worked as advertised when I tested it. Color documents that I set up on one computer moved flawlessly to a second machine running ChromaFax's software. So, propeller head that I am, I was duly impressed. I nearly sat down and wrote a glowing "you-must-buy-this-right-now" review.

I had forgotten for a while that if someone wants to send me those "fabulous color documents," they can print them out using their own ink and their own costly clay-coated color paper and then have Runyon deliver them to me.

With good color paper running around $1 per sheet and color ink a liquid far more costly than good Scotch, a 32-cent stamp isn't much more to bear.

And keep in mind that if Runyon runs your stuff, you don't have to worry about the pages of your carefully crafted color document getting read out of order, either. You can staple them together.

You can even spray on a dollop of perfume or fold your letter into an origami giraffe or a paper airplane. ChromaFax that.

ChromaFax is, in fact, just one little-noted sidebar to the Bill Gates success story. It works due to the fact that virtually every computer now being sold runs Microsoft Windows 95 and that this operating system makes every machine that runs it a fax machine as well as a PC.

Windows 95 includes full-featured faxing software that allows uncounted millions of users to simply send any document they cook up on their word processors to any fax machine on earth, assuming, of course, that they have the phone number.

Meanwhile, Dataquest Inc., the San Jose, Calif., market research arm of the prestigious Gartner Group, estimates that there now are 16 million fax machines in service in the U.S., up from just 3.8 million in 1990.

Dataquest's study estimated that Americans will send 65 billion faxed pages this year, which works out to 250 sheets per person.

Faxes, of course, are supposed to be impressive. They're supposed to make us think that whatever they have to say can't wait.

What they say to this writer is that the person at the other end didn't have the time or the patience to haul out an envelope and lick a stamp.

It is, after all, a lot easier to fire off a fax than to go to the trouble to send something via snail mail. This writer suspects strongly that it is laziness rather than urgency that fuels faxing frenzy.

When people call me and ask for a fax number, I tell them about Marvin Runyon.